Cloud migration: Redefining the role of CIO as enterprises transform

A recent research by Oracle has revealed some interesting insights – Indian businesses are rapidly adopting cloud services as a means to boost innovation and performance. While there is concern on security, requirements and cost issues are driving adoption. 79 percent of the enterprises in India are using cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) to some extent.   

” With new, modern cloud infrastructure services available and increased  experience, we are now seeing high levels of success and satisfaction from businesses that are saving money, cutting complexity and driving exciting innovation’’, says, Subash Nambiar, VP Cloud-platform, Oracle

According to a Gartner report, public cloud services in India grew to $1.81 billion in 2017 from $1.31 billion in 2016 with a growth rate of 38 percent. Among the three models of cloud services, Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) contributed highest to the growth of cloud services in India.    

Cloud Adoption – Use cases

According to a Microsoft report, 52 of the top 100 Indian companies listed on BSE have adopted Microsoft Cloud services in some manner or the other. While Amazon Web Services (AWS) has catered to over 90 percent of the top start-ups in India, Google has just about launched its cloud platform in 2017.

Healthcare – Leading healthcare providers such as Apollo Hospitals and Max Healthcare use Microsoft Azure and office 365. This has led to improvement in patient care and enhanced operational efficiency.

Education -The Azim Premji Foundation, a not-for-profit in education sector uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run all its operations including application software, database and networking. It hopes to double its user base to 10,000 through AWS.

Government -The government of Andhra Pradesh uses Azure machine learning to predict student dropouts in 10,000 schools. This has led to 600,000 predictions being used to increase student retention.

Cloud redefining CIOs role

At the recently held IDG’s CIO Year Ahead 2018 conference , Cloud was one of the five major themes that unveiled the IT roadmap for enterprises. CIOs’ focus areas for the coming years will be to improve IT operations, implementing new systems and architecture and aligning IT and business goals. 

CIOs will be prompted to accelerate cloud adoption in a bid to bring down operational and infrastructure costs and drive agility. As per Forrester Research, 72 percent of Indian enterprises look to spend on customer experience which requires a blend of in-house skills and cloud based applications. Cloud providers such as Google and Amazon have announced their India based data centres heralding the demand for cloud services from the Indian business community.           

The use cases above signal an important thing for CIOs – the narrative is set to change as they align with other CXOs to drive business transformation.

Cloud demand by verticals

Amongst the industry verticals adopting cloud, IT/ITES vertical has the maximum adoption rate and has contributed to around 35-45 percent of the total public cloud spending according to a Zinnov report. Manufacturing comes second which has leveraged (and will continue to) SaaS solutions such as marketing, analytical tools and CRM solutions. Banking and Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) vertical comes third as they increase investments in data centres.

Healthcare is also adopting cloud for data storage and analytics purposes while retail and telecom sectors are using data analytics in a big way to both understand and service customers, better. A relatively new sector, e-commerce has embraced cloud into get insights into customer buying patterns, delivery aspects and sales analysis.

There is an imminent need for enterprises across all verticals to move ahead and succeed in a dynamic and highly competitive business ecosystem.  Migrating to cloud helps enterprises farm off their IT infrastructure requirements, optimize costs and focus on their core businesses.